Boy, does this look like fun. You got your flakes, your foam, your sheets of Kapton plastic, your laser, and you wake up in the morning with a hangover and a new type of super graphene battery. This interesting mashup comes to us by way of that dynamic duo of graphene, Rice University and the US Air Force (more on that later), so you know it’s got to be good.

For those of you new to the graphene topic, before we discovered nanocellulose fibers we were calling graphene the nanomaterial of the new millennium. Graphene is a sheet of carbon only one atom thick. This nano-slim frame provides it with exceptional strength and conductivity, dovetailing perfectly with new clean technology.

The problem is how to actually use something that is only one atom thick, and that’s where the graphene battery — the graphene supercapacitor, to be more precise — comes in.

The Rice University Graphene Battery

A supercapacitor is a type of battery that charges and discharges rapidly, so we’re going to just simplify things by calling it a battery most of the time.

The Rice team made their new graphene microsupercapacitor (same thing as a supercapacitor but smaller) using a process they call LIG, for laser induced graphene.

They solved the first problem — how to use something that is only one atom thick — by creating their graphene battery on a base of plastic film. That took some doing, as it turned out that not all plastic film is equal when it comes to graphene batteries.

They finally nailed it when they got to polyimide, a heat-resistant plastic film that’s been around for about 50 years or so.

The rest of the setup is relatively simple. Instead of trying to layer single-atom sheets of graphene onto the plastic, the team applied a porous foam of graphene flakes.

New Lithium-Ion Battery Discovery Contradicts Everything You Thought You Knew

Researchers over at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have made a new lithium-ion battery discovery that could prove a little disconcerting to a lot of folks in the energy storage field. The finding comes out of a first-of-its-kind analysis using X-ray absorption spectroscopy, and apparently it contradicts “numerous” studies aimed at improving the efficiency of lithium-ion batteries.

The good news is, the new lithium-ion battery discovery could accelerate the development of next-generation EV batteries, so let’s see what all the buzz is about.

The new lithium-ion battery research focused on unlocking some of the mystery behind the nanoscale function of the liquid electrolyte in lithium-ion batteries. For those of you new to the battery topic, the electrolyte is the stuff that enables an electrical charge to flow from the battery to whatever device you want to electrify, so yeah, the electrolyte is pretty important.

The electrolyte commonly used in lithium-ion batteries consists of a lithium salt dissolved in a solvent, typically based on an alkyl carbonate. Here’s the deal according to study co-author Richard SayKally of Berkeley Lab:

There’s disagreement in the battery industry on the nature of the local solvation environment of lithium ions in these solutions, a critical issue because the desolvation of the ions as they move through the negative electrode is believed to limit the electrical power that can be made available.

An experimental lithium-ion battery based on materials developed at a U.S. Department of Energy lab stores twice as much energy as the batteries used in most electric cars.

If the technology can be commercialized, it could give affordable electric cars a range of over 200 miles per charge, says Hal Zarem, CEO of Seeo, a startup that’s working on the technology. Today the cheapest electric cars, which cost around $30,000, typically have a range of less than 100 miles.

Alternatively, the improved storage capacity could be used to cut the size of battery packs in half while maintaining the current driving range, making electric vehicles considerably cheaper. A conventional battery pack with a range of 100 miles costs roughly $10,000.

Seeo, which is based in Hayward, California, recently raised $17 million from investors, including Samsung Ventures. It plans to start shipping batteries to potential customers for evaluation next year.

Don’t break out the widow’s weeds just yet, but it looks like momentum is building for energy storage to move past the lithium-ion phase and get into the more powerful territory of lithium-sulfur technology. In the latest development, a multinational research team has figured out how to overcome a major obstacle in the path of lithium-sulfur energy storage, by using graphene as a “bridge” between different components.

In theory, lithium sulfur (Li-S) batteries possess far greater energy density than the familiar lithium-ion (Li-ion), so breaking the technology out of the lab and into commercial development could have huge clean tech implications for EV battery range and energy storage for solar and wind sources, among other applications.

Faster or free? That was the question posed by Tesla CEO Elon Musk last year when he unveiled the company’s battery swap technology that, he claims, is faster than topping up a conventional premium saloon’s fuel tank.

Model S owners currently have the option of stopping at one of Tesla’s 312 stations and use one of the 1,748 Superchargers available to charge their vehicles’ battery. The only problem is that they have to wait for an hour to obtain a 400-mile (640 km) range, which may not be convenient.

Therefore Tesla has developed a scheme in which the driver will stop at a station and simply replace the EV’s depleted battery back for a fully charged one. This takes three minutes, or less than the time needed to top-up a premium saloon’s fuel tank with gas. Musk said that this is due to the time needed to remove the titanium and aluminum plates that shield the battery, otherwise it would take just a minute and it’s something the company is working on.

For the time being, Tesla is initiating a pilot program with invited Model S owners, who will be able to swap the battery at a custom-built station across the street from Tesla Superchargers at Harris Ranch, California.

The nag is that a. they will have to make an appointment and b. pay a fee, which Musk says will be “slightly less” than the cost of filling up a gas-powered premium saloon’s fuel tank.

New Years is a good time for individuals to look to ahead and to wonder a bit about what the future holds them. The same is true for companies and for entire industries.

Earlier this past year at the Battery Show, Christophe Pillot of Avicenne Energy made a presentation about the state of the worldwide battery market in 2013. One of the slides in Mr. Pillot’s presentation was a bar graph breaking down the battery market into its largest individual components. The largest component shown on Mr. Pillot’s slide, of course, was SLI batteries followed by portable batteries. Other automotive batteries came next, followed by a large number of industrial and stationary battery applications in increasingly smaller sizes accounting for the balance of the market. Certain applications that generated a lot of attention this year, such as residential and grid ESS, were so small as to be barely perceptible on Mr. Pillot’s graph.

The interesting question to ponder in the New Year is what will Mr. Pillot’s graph look like 10 or 15 years from now? How is the industry going to change? And perhaps, more interestingly, what significant bars will appear on Mr. Pillot’s graph in 2030 that we do not even anticipate today?

As to the question of how the industry is going to change, the balance of Mr. Pillot himself made several interesting predictions. Mr. Pillot suggests that by 2025, lead acid batteries, including SLI batteries, will still represent the largest share of the market. During the 2012-2020 period, however, Mr. Pillot expects the market for lead acid batteries to grow at a 4% CAGR. Lithium-ion batteries and the applications they serve will grow, according to Mr. Pillot, at a 16% CAGR. Mr. Pillot predicts that by 2020, the lithium-ion battery market, powered by the growth of the xEV and ESS applications, will be more than half the size of the market for lead acid batteries.

This is all very interesting. But what about the bars that will appear on Mr. Pillot’s graph in 2030 that do not even appear on his graph for 2013? Is there a “killer app” that will emerge in the next 15 years that could fundamentally impact the market for batteries? After all, would xEV’s, ESS, and notebook and tablet computers have even appeared on Mr. Pillot’s graph in 2000?

It is not difficult to speculate on what some of the new “killer apps” for batteries might be by 2030. Robotics, control systems, advanced weaponry, and wearable consumer goods are all possibilities. If we have learned anything over the last 15 years, it is that the battery market is dynamic and the greatest limit on that market is not technology but imagination.

At the NAATBatt 2015 Annual Meeting & Conference next February in Phoenix, we will take a serious look at one of the new battery technologies that may well drive some of these “killer apps” and perhaps emerge as a significant bar on Mr. Pillot’s slide for the battery market in 2030: thin film battery technology.

This brings us back to the missing bars on Mr. Pillot’s future slide showing the composition of the battery industry in 2030. My bet is that one of the most significant bars on that graph, which is entirely missing on the graph for 2013, will be the thin film batteries that power what some pundit already refer to as the “internet of everything”: the interconnection of almost all devices and consumer products to each other. If my guess is right, this will be a huge opportunity for the battery industry as a whole. I hope you will join us in Phoenix next February and learn more about it.

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. H. G. Wells.Fatih Birol's motto: leave oil before it leaves us.

Are electric car's batteries made of renewable or nonrenewable resources? I would like to know what an electric car's battery is made of. That way I can evaluate if electric cars are viable alternative to fossil fuel based transport.

That's all I'm asking. I would really appreciate your help.

History repeats itself. Just everytime with different characters and players.

No. 1 hybrid vehicle manufacturer ,Toyota, announced the launch of the world's first recycling business for NiMH car batteries. The program will recover the nickel in order to make new batteries, while also lowering the production cost of future hybrid batteries.

The Toyota HV Call Center will be a resource for consumers to find out where to take their non-working batteries. It will also be constructing several recycling facilities with the help of Toyota Chemical Engineering.

In the U.S., the lead-acid car battery is a highly recycled material, with a 99.2 percent recycling rate in 2008, according to the EPA. Many retailers will also accept old batteries when a new one is purchased. As a result, many car batteries sold in the U.S. have a large portion of recycled content, including both lead and the plastic casing.

And second life uses for batteries are also being explored, like grid storage. Even if the battery is no longer good enough for automotive use, it may still be good enough for grid storage.

The automotive and recycling industries appear to be proactive on this issue. They're already planning ways to deal with tens of thousands of knackered nickel-metal hydride hybrid batteries from conventional hybrids and lethargic lithium-ion batteries from electric cars.

Recycling is expected to help keep battery costs down because it will permit the reuse of the metals and rare-earth compounds that make these batteries work, which is cheaper than mining and processing all-new material. With lithium-ion batteries accounting for as much as half the cost of a new EV, reducing battery costs through recycling will go a long way toward making electric-drive vehicles competitive with conventional cars when it comes to price.

Reuse Before RecyclingFor lithium-ion batteries, there's a potential after-automotive use that can postpone destructive recycling for years. For instance, several major power utilities are working with companies — including General Motors, Ford, Toyota and Nissan — to explore the use of the batteries for stationary storage of the power produced in off-peak periods by wind turbines and solar generation stations.

Snips and snails and puppy dogs tails. All renewable resources. We will never run out.

Except for maybe for the puppy dogs' tails. The free market will find a replacement.

I soooooooo wanted to write something like this, thanks for covering this base GregT! And the backup, kubli!

Now Desu.....what shall we do with you. I'm convinced more than ever that you're a bot, perhaps it's the Commander Data social skills.....or my inability to believe that there are levels this low sent strictly to increase the noise to signal ratio here....what gives, Jeeves?